A note: I would never recommend pitching lager yeast that warm. I would instead recommend ensuring a proper yeast pitching amount and pitch at the ferment temp typical of a lager. You are likely going to create a butter-bomb of diacetyl with a pitch like that...

An MSU grad would not have realized he had not added the solution, and in 4 weeks would find a bottle was flat. He'd open and try another. Then another... Until all 23 bottles had been sampled. Bottle position has nothing to do with batch priming, ya gotta add the sugar solution to the slimline.

Use canned. You would have to pasteurize fresh or frozen. 1-2 cans per batch. You could also consider using an extract as it will give you a better flavor. 1-2 oz of extract per 2 gallons added at bottling will suffice.

Safale US-05 is also known as the "Chico" strain. It was originally introduced by Sierra Nevada (it's used in their beers) and is the country's most popular brewing yeast. It's also the same as White Labs 001 (WLP001) and Wyeast's American Ale (WY 1056).

Follow the instructions for the Oktoberfest. It's technically not a lager, but can be brewed as one using lager yeast. The yeast that comes with it is an ale yeast and should be brewed at the recommended temps.

Using scented soap once or twice when you have nothing else won't hurt anything as long as you thoroughly rinse whatever you're cleaning. But prolonged use of scented soaps can leave permanent scents in your LBK. Using any soap can leave a residue behind that will inhibit yeast performance unless you rinse several times, therefore, in my opinion, it's best to just not use soap at all.

Don't get discouraged, you're just finding making a "big beer" is hard. My first try at a Strong Scottish Ale(a Wee Heavy) came out really nasty. Re read this thread, there's a lot of good advice in it. Brew a couple easy recipes using HMEs you might want to mix, to see if you think they'll mix well.

I would have thought that too, except these days people are saying you can do that sort of thing (long periods in the primary) without any problems. Back in the day everybody thought your beer would taste like a tire if you left it in the primary for more than a couple weeks. Now I'm reading about people leaving beers in the primary for months with no problems. All of mine go 3-4 weeks now with good results so far, and I believe racking to a seondary too quickly was a mistake I repeated with just about every batch I made up until my return to brewing this year. I never purged my secondaries with CO2, and in this case the fermentation activity in the secondary would do the purging for me. Between you and me, I think purging with CO2 is unnecessary, except maybe if you have excessive headspace in your secondary and there's no fermentation activity producing CO2. People actually talk about purging their bottling buckets, and purging each individual bottle at bottling time. Those people are insane.

josh- we had reclaimed water in Detroit when I was a tadpole. aside from sometimes being overly chlorinated and sometimes not having enough (slight grassy / mold taste) It didn't do any harm to me. I mean we had reclaimed water in Detroit when I was a tadpole. aside from sometimes being overly chlorinated and sometimes not having enough (slight grassy / mold taste) It didn't do any harm to me. trees the dog blue fourty five itchy. can the has it ?

This is true, and we have the best place to meet up: Sentinel Peak. It's the new brewery that just opened up on Grant and Swan. I'm currently the brewer for them. Check it, we've even got a whole shelf of Mr. Beer products set up there.